All Who Go Do Not Return: A Memoir

Shulem Deen was raised to believe that questions are dangerous. As a member of the Skverers, one of the most insular Hasidic sects in the US, he knows little about the outside world - only that it is to be shunned. His marriage at 18 is arranged, and several children soon follow.

Uncovered: How I Left Hasidic Life and Finally Came Home

In Uncovered, Leah Lax tells her story - beginning as a young teen who left her liberal, secular home for life as a Hasidic Jew and ending as a 40-something woman who has to abandon the only world she's known for 30 years in order to achieve personal freedom.

The Two-Family House: A Novel

Brooklyn, 1947: In the midst of a blizzard, in a two-family brownstone, two babies are born minutes apart to two women. They are sisters by marriage, with an impenetrable bond forged before and during that dramatic night; but as the years progress, small cracks start to appear, and their once deep friendship begins to unravel. No one knows why, and no one can stop it. One misguided choice; one moment of tragedy. Heartbreak wars with happiness and almost but not quite wins.

This Is Not a Love Story: A Memoir

A razor-sharp, hilarious, and poignant memoir about growing up in the closed world of the ultraorthodox Jewish community. The third of six children in a family that harks back to a gloried Hassidic dynasty, Judy Brown grew up with the legacy of centuries of religious teaching and the faith and lore that sustained her people for generations.

The Outside World

Tzippy Goldman was born for marriage. She and her mother had always assumed she'd graduate high school, be set up with the right boy, and have a beautiful wedding with white lace and pareve vanilla cream frosting. But at twenty-two, Tzippy's fast approaching spinsterhood. She dreams of escape; instead, she leaves for a year in Jerusalem.There she meets - re-meets - Baruch, the son of her mother's college roommate. When Tzippy last saw him, his name was Bryan and he wore a Yankees-logo yarmulke.

Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History

The NBC journalist who covered - and took fire from - Donald Trump on the campaign trail offers an inside look at the most shocking presidential election in American history. Intriguing, disturbing, and powerful, Unbelievable is an unprecedented eyewitness account of the 2016 election from an intelligent, dedicated journalist at the center of it - a thoughtful historical record that offers eye-opening insights and details on our political process, the media, and the mercurial 45th president of the United States.

Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots

In this captivating memoir, Deborah Feldman takes listeners on an eye-opening journey into Orthodox Jewish culture. Raised in the suffocating world of Brooklyn’s Satmar Hasidim, Feldman was told what to read and who she was allowed to talk to. Married off at 17, she suffered from anxiety and was shamed by an inability to please her older husband. But after giving birth to a son at age 19, Feldman realized it was time to tear up her roots and make her own path in life.

Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation After My Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood

Leah Vincent was born into the Yeshivish community, a fundamentalist sect of ultra-Orthodox Judaism. As the daughter of an influential rabbi, Leah and her ten siblings were raised to worship two things: God and the men who ruled their world. But the tradition-bound future Leah envisioned for herself was cut short when, at sixteen, she was caught exchanging letters with a male friend, a violation of religious law that forbids contact between members of the opposite sex. Leah's parents were unforgiving.

Little Fires Everywhere

In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned - from the layout of the winding roads to the colors of the houses to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules. Enter Mia Warren - an enigmatic artist and single mother - who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenage daughter, Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons.

The Weight of Ink

Set in the London of the 1660s and of the early 21st century, The Weight of Ink is the interwoven tale of two women of remarkable intellect: Ester Velasquez, an emigrant from Amsterdam who is permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi, just before the plague hits the city, and Helen Watt, an ailing historian with a love of Jewish history. As the novel opens, Helen has been summoned by a former student to view a cache of 17th-century Jewish documents newly discovered in his home during a renovation.

Anything Is Possible: A Novel

Here are two sisters: One trades self-respect for a wealthy husband while the other finds in the pages of a book a kindred spirit who changes her life. The janitor at the local school has his faith tested in an encounter with an isolated man he has come to help; a grown daughter longs for mother love even as she comes to accept her mother's happiness in a foreign country; and the adult Lucy Barton (the heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton, the author's celebrated New York Times best seller) returns to visit her siblings after 17 years of absence.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness: A Novel

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness transports us across a subcontinent on a journey of many years. It takes us deep into the lives of its gloriously rendered characters, each of them in search of a place of safety - in search of meaning and of love.

The Ritual Bath: The First Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus Novel

Detective Peter Decker of the LAPD is stunned when he gets the report. Someone has shattered the sanctuary of a remote yeshiva community in the California hills with an unimaginable crime. One of the women was brutally raped as she returned from the mikvah, the bathhouse where the cleansing ritual is performed.

The Alice Network: A Novel

In the chaotic aftermath of World War II, American college girl Charlie St. Clair is pregnant, unmarried, and on the verge of being thrown out of her very proper family. She's also nursing a desperate hope that her beloved cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war, might still be alive.

Saving Sophie: A Novel

Jack Sommers was just an ordinary accountant from Chicago - that is until his wife passed away, his young daughter was kidnapped, and he became the main suspect in an $88 million embezzlement case. Now Jack is on the run, hoping to avoid the feds long enough to rescue his daughter, Sophie, from her maternal grandfather, a suspected terrorist in Palestine.

Faithful: A Novel

Growing up on Long Island, Shelby Richmond is an ordinary girl until one night an extraordinary tragedy changes her fate. Her best friend's future is destroyed in an accident while Shelby walks away with the burden of guilt. What happens when a life is turned inside out? When love is something so distant it may as well be a star in the sky? Faithful is the story of a survivor filled with emotion, from dark suffering to true happiness - a moving portrait of a young woman finding her way in the modern world.

Once We Were Brothers

Elliot Rosenzweig, a respected civic leader and philanthropist, is attending a fundraiser when he is suddenly accosted and accused of being a former Nazi SS officer named Otto Piatek, the Butcher of Zamosc. Although the charges are denounced as preposterous, his accuser is convinced he is right and engages attorney Catherine Lockhart to bring Rosenzweig to justice.

The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector's Story

An extraordinary insight into life under one of the world's most ruthless and secretive dictatorships - and the story of one woman's terrifying struggle to avoid capture/repatriation and guide her family to freedom. As a child growing up in North Korea, Hyeonseo Lee was one of millions trapped by a secretive and brutal communist regime. Her home on the border with China gave her some exposure to the world beyond the confines of the Hermit Kingdom....

Invisible City

Just months after Rebekah Roberts was born, her mother, an Hasidic Jew from Brooklyn, abandoned her Christian boyfriend and newborn baby to return to her religion. Neither Rebekah nor her father have heard from her since. Now a recent college graduate, Rebekah has moved to New York City to follow her dream of becoming a big-city reporter.

Up from Orchard Street

Three generations of Roths live together in a crowded tenement flat. Long-widowed Manya is the family's head and its heart. But Manya is no soft touch, except, perhaps, where her granddaughter Elka is concerned. Precocious Elka is her closest companion and confidante. Through Elka's eyes we come to know the fascinating characters who move in and out of the Roths' lives.

The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

Before Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich begins a summer job at a law firm in Louisiana, working to help defend men accused of murder, she thinks her position is clear. The child of two lawyers, she is staunchly anti-death penalty. But the moment convicted murderer Ricky Langley's face flashes on the screen as she reviews old tapes - the moment she hears him speak of his crimes - she is overcome with the feeling of wanting him to die. Shocked by her reaction, she digs deeper and deeper into the case.

The Bridal Chair

As a child growing up in 1920s Paris, Ida Chagall copes with her father Marc Chagall's brilliant artistic mind and overbearing ego and the tight leash he keeps on her. But as Ida blossoms into a young woman, she begins to glimpse freedom and opportunities for herself.

They May Not Mean To, But They Do: A Novel

Joy Bergman is not slipping into old age with the quiet grace her children, Molly and Daniel, would prefer. She won't take their advice, and she won't take an antidepressant. Her marriage to their father, Aaron, has lasted through health and dementia, as well as some phenomenally lousy business decisions. The Bergman clan has always stuck together, growing as it incorporated in-laws, ex-in-laws, and same-sex spouses. But families don't just grow, they grow old.

Publisher's Summary

Nineteen-year-old Chani lives in the ultra-orthodox Jewish community of North West London. She has never had physical contact with a man, but is bound to marry a stranger. The rabbi's wife teaches her what it means to be a Jewish wife, but Rivka has her own questions to answer. Soon buried secrets, fear, and sexual desire bubble to the surface; not to mention what happens on the wedding night….

Eve Harris taught for 12 years at inner-city comprehensives and independent schools in London and also in Tel Aviv, after moving to Israel in 1999.

Enjoyed this book and glad I got it on audio as lots of names etc. I wouldn't have been able to pronounce correctly! Really interesting to learn about the lives of orthodox Jews and a story that made me laugh out loud in places... not so appropriate on a cross trainer in a busy gym!

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

Polly Pon

7/26/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"The Marrying of Chani Kaufman"

What would have made The Marrying of Chani Kaufman better?

I found the content of this book interesting from the point of learning about different cultures views. I did think it could have been shorter and felt it had been 'padded' out in places.

What will your next listen be?

The Olive Tree

Would you be willing to try another one of Toni Green’s performances?

Yes her reading was worth listening to

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

Interest is other cultures

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

chrissieb

7/8/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"Very interesting"

A fascinating glimpse into a different culture. I love books that allow you to learn. The story is good but the ending seems a little too neat. All being shoehorned into an acceptable compromise or just giving in to the inevitable. Surely some people cannot accommodate this. Maybe that would never happen but for such an old respected culture you would have thought by the very nature of human beings some people just cannot fit into the rigid mould. Maybe that's a different book.Nevertheless ignore my quibble this is a good book, well presented and of inestimable value to people like myself who have little knowledge of such a world and are very curious about it.Thank you for writing it.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

Sarah P.

3/10/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"Very predictable!!"

What did you like best about The Marrying of Chani Kaufman? What did you like least?

It was a predictable story, but easy to listen to. Some of the references made me laugh but others made me cringe. Some were wholly inaccurate!

What didn’t you like about Toni Green’s performance?

She pronounced so many Hebrew words wrong!!!!!!!! Surely this should have been researched first!?!??!?

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

Carol

Manchester, United Kingdom

3/8/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"I hope she's busy on the sequel"

Would you consider the audio edition of The Marrying of Chani Kaufman to be better than the print version?

I went to school with Jewish girls in North London. The narrator worked for me.

What other book might you compare The Marrying of Chani Kaufman to, and why?

Very difficult to say in that it's almost a period piece yet not a period piece. A slice of 21st century London that you glimpse, but never get. Teenage girls in the middle of London who don't know how babies get made? Schools, that accept kids on condition that they don't have TV in the house? I've never come across a story like it where the values and customs are almost from another era, yet they have mobiles in their pockets!

Which scene did you most enjoy?

The disastrous proposal was fun. Still reeling from the first visit to the ritual bath.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

Poor Rifka reached out to her husband and his strong beliefs wouldn't let him help her.

Any additional comments?

could have done with a glossary-some of the words even hard to look up in a dictionary because of their strange pronunciation. Not sure how you do that on audio.WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? Come on now, there's at least one more book in there-how does Jerusalem go? Does the marriage survive? What does Mrs Levy try next? Rifka or Rebecca? Does Avromi really never again? thoroughly enjoyed this-not Jewish but lived on edge of several orthodox communities in my time. More please!

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

kate

Stirling, Australia

2/15/15

Overall

Performance

Story

"Interesting, educational, but didn't grab me"

What did you like best about The Marrying of Chani Kaufman? What did you like least?

I learnt things about orthodox judaism, but the story didn't grab me, and I wasn't sure what the point was. It was OK. Didn't have to force myself to listen, but certainly wasn't seeking extra opportunities to listen.

The author does have a gift with words - i could see the people. I could see them physically, their personalities, their traits.

If this book were a film would you go see it?

I would - it would possibly be a better movie than book.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

Report Inappropriate Content

If you find this review inappropriate and think it should be removed from our site, let us know. This report will be reviewed by Audible and we will take appropriate action.